elementcraft8 Reviews

Argylle (2024)

Comedic, entertaining spy movie

[9/10 · 7 February 2024]

This movie was just plain fun.

There were so many paradigm shifts that were unexpected but perfectly executed. The plot was solid, the characters were great. And the twists were not cliche. I was very impressed.

The scene and camera transitions were clever. The banter and action were creative. My whole audience was laughing from their guy's every couple of minutes. I highly recommend it.

Dallas Howard shows off her acting ability. She's got an arsenal of emotions and personality. Sam Rockwell executed his part perfectly. My wife and I left the theater talking about the movie and what we liked all the way back to the babysitter.

Geostorm (2017)

Charming but deeply flawed

[5/10 · 12 January 2023]

The plot delivery for even simple things was forced and over dramatic. How do were tell the audience these two are brothers? Let's have one of them call the other "little brother." That's normal talk, right? Well it probably was needed because these brothers who were very close growing up has completely different regional accents.

Sometimes you ignore implausiblity in scifi movies because... it's scifi. But having one man with a small team get a net of thousands of satellites up and he's barely in his 40s? That's far fetched.

The disaster scenes were so perfectly fortuitous for certain characters, it could have been a Michael Bay movie.

Overall, the plot was blunt - out was explained to you instead of shown.

Daddy's Home 2 (2017)

Better than the first

[10/10 · 4 March 2018]

Sort of like National Lampoon's Christmas vacation, a family tries to come together during the holidays, but everything seems to go wrong. You laugh, you cringe, you get angry, and you sympathize. Great morals in the end. Good running jokes. It was great to see each of the characters play these roles. Gibson, Ferrel, Whalburg, Lithglow, Cena, etc. They did great.

Luke Cage (2016–2018)

Dark Chocolate: Sweet and Bitter

[6/10 · 13 December 2016]

I love the emphasis on black culture and I love the main character, Luke Cage.

That's about all I like.

The series tries to shock you with twists, but instead they are just plot points that either don't belong or have no explanation. Some reasons with spoilers left at the bottom.

Luke Cage in the comics is supposed to be Hero for Hire. In this rendition, he avoids being a hero at all costs.

Jessica Jones tried to spice things up with a sex scene every other episode. In this series, the opening episode had a sex scene but then nothing after that. I don't know which is worse. The motivation for this sex scene was extremely poor and it did not reflect the rest of the series. It was a terrible hook for audiences who like to watch strangers have sex to get into the series.

SPOILERS Let's start with Clair Temple, the nurse from Hell's Kitchen. She was a romantic interest for Matt Murdock in Daredevil, but distanced herself from him because she couldn't handle his violent and bloody hobby of saving the city which could leave him in tatters. What does she do when she meets Luke Cage? She immediately pressures him to be a hero and do dangerous things, even becoming a side kick. Aw, man, and her line at the final fight scene? "Remember who you are." THAT CAME FROM NOWHERE! I CRINGED.

Final villain: half brother, Diamondback. Best friend to Luke Cage his whole life until suddenly... not. Terrible motivation and excessive vendetta. Weak character they tried to make really creepy.

Script writing was sometimes terrible. Events and conversations were forced. You could tell the writers wanted something to go somewhere or to flash a character as a foreshadowing, but didn't know how to make it work, so they just wedged a blunt action or comment in there. For example, when a stooge reports to Cottonmouth while his cousin is on the second floor--before Cottonmouth uses the rocket launcher. His cousin is listening in on the conversation, which she has no part of, from another floor. At the end of it, everyone walks away and she shouts from the upper floor, "I don't want to know, just get it done!" or something like that.\ No one was talking to her. No one wanted to fill her in on anything. They left to take care of business. And yet she says this stupid comment. The writers just wanted to make her look precariously authoritative over Cottonmouth as a foreshadowing. But it was awful.

Besides that, the story went from episode to episode as if they didn't know where the writers were going--almost as if they had different people in charge of each episode who barely talked to each other. It was tough.

I love marvel. I love Luke Cage! But this series was bad.